This shouldn’t be a debate. We marketers just need to step up and be noticed.

The success statistics of CGOs speak for themselves, but why isn’t this drive coming from us, the marketers? My takeout is more a rally, a mobilisation of marketing best practice to surface the CMO of the future.

I want to see an empowerment of the c-suite collective, supported by passionate, inspired and insightful marketers. A company without alignment on its purpose, vision and goals will invariably see friction between departments, and if a marketing leader can’t pivot to new and emerging paths, while maintaining their ground on the fundamentals, then someone else in the business will.

In 2016, marketers were focused on using deep data to improve their brand’s customer experience. Betting, as the research by The Economist (The Path to 2020) suggested, ‘that personalised, efficient, and consistent customer experience would translate into customer loyalty and brand value’.

With increasing pressures on the bottom line stretching marketing budgets, some CMOs have been too focused on rebuilding their content and media skewed teams around data, analytics and performance marketing, to notice that their company peers are looking at the very thing the CMO should be most passionate about; the consumer’s next step, the consumer of the future, and therefore the role their company can play in that future. 

If John Keats was around today, he might just be a marketer instead of a poet, because it’s his words that should define the marketing team’s mantra. We are not here merely to sell products in the current day. We are here to reimagine a life better lived. To make real a new experience unimagined before. It doesn’t take a fancy title to change what you already are.